Op uitnodiging van Art Cinema OFFoff presenteert de Duitse cineaste Helena Wittmann een carte blanche-programma rond haar nieuwe film Human Flowers of Flesh – te zien tijdens Film Fest Gent.
Helena Wittmann (1982) studeerde aan de kunstacademie in Hamburg waar ze les kreeg van Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home But, The Dreamed Path, Orly), een boegbeeld van de Berlijnse School. Haar langspeeldebuut Drift (2017) werd meteen ontvangen als een van de meest originele en indrukwekkende films van de afgelopen jaren. Drift knipoogde duidelijk naar Michael Snows Wavelength (1967) en met opvolger Human Flowers of Flesh, waarvoor ze zelf de prachtige 16mm-fotografie verzorgde, toont ze andermaal haar affiniteit met de experimentele filmtraditie. Een gedroomde gast voor OFFoff. Haar werk is onder meer vertoond op de filmfestivals van Locarno, Oberhausen en Venetië, de Viennale, FID Marseille, IFFR, New Directors/New Films, TIFF Wavelengths en Tate Modern.
In haar carte blanche verbindt Wittmann enkele absolute klassiekers uit de experimentele canon met jong werk. Ze combineert een eigen kortfilm, Wildnis (2013), met een mijlpaal uit de avant-garde waar ze als student over schreef, Unsere Afrikareise (1966) van de Weense grootmeester Peter Kubelka. Een inspiratiebron waar in Human Flowers of Flesh uit wordt geciteerd, is de roman De Matroos van Gibraltar (1952) van Marguerite Duras, de Franse schrijfster-cineaste van wie Wittmann graag Les Mains négatives (1978) laat zien. Ze vindt ook veel verwantschap in het hedendaagse werk van Dane Komljen (All the Cities of the North) en selecteert zijn inventieve Phantasiesätze (2017). Tot slot kiest Wittmann voor de eerste experimentele film die ze ooit zag en waar ze tijdens het maken van Human Flowers of Flesh vaak aan terugdacht: het magische Mothlight (1963) van Stan Brakhage. “Kind of a wild program,” aldus Wittmann.
“Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. Her bewitching sophomore feature Human Flowers of Flesh, an elliptical tale of female desire set on the high seas, pushes Wittmann’s materialist impulses further than ever. The film’s oceanic narrative progression is nothing if not imposing.” — Jordan Cronk
We tonen alle films op de originele filmdrager! De 35mm-kopie van Les Mains négatives wordt live ondertiteld in het Engels.
Gevolgd door een gesprek met Helena Wittmann over haar invloeden en manier van werken.
Peter Kubelka
Unsere Afrikareise
AT • 1966 • 13' • colour • 16mm
In 1961, Kubelka was hired to document the African hunting trip of a group of European tourists. He accompanied them, recorded many hours of film and sound, but afterwards hijacked the material and spent five years editing this material into a most unconventional film. The result, Unsere Afrikareise, is one of the most densely packed 12½ minutes in film history, and makes truly extraordinary use of the creative possibilities of sound. Kubelka weds an image to a sound recorded elsewhere. He calls these combinations “sync events”, e.g. a gunshot appears to shoot a hat off a man’s head, or white and black men shake hands to the sound of thunder. By combining these disparate elements, Kubelka makes “articulations” (his words), which fuse separate pieces both rhythmically and thematically in a manner possible only in film. — Fred Camper “For me, Unsere Afrikareise is, in its own genre, the most intense sound film that exists.” — Peter Kubelka “Unsere Afrikareise is about the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen. I have seen it four times and I am going to see it many, many times more, and the more I see it, the more I see in it. Kubelka’s film is one of cinema’s few masterpieces and a work of such great perfection that it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one knew about cinema. The incredible artistry of this man, his incredible patience. (He worked on Unsere Afrikareise for five years; the film is 12 and a half minutes long.) His methods of working (he learned by heart 14 hours of tapes and three hours of film, frame by frame), and the beauty of his accomplishment makes the rest of us look like amateurs.” — Jonas Mekas “One of the most sophisticated visions in the history of the cinema.” — P. Adams Sitney
Potatoes have to be peeled, withered orchid blossoms must be plucked. Then everything is in order. In addition to demonstrating the unexpected complexities of individual life paths, Wildnis (TheWild) establishes the possibility of “cinematic space” becoming a type of “third space”. Two seemingly contrasting spaces merge to construct a new space. The first space is the living room of a retired couple. The second space is embodied in Super 8 recordings filmed by the old man during his numerous trips to Africa and Asia during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The pictures show exotic animals which are projected directly onto the walls and furniture of the house. The assembly of these differing spaces does not create a more succinct boundary between them, but rather assists in the mingling of the two spaces. In this fleeting moment of third space, as it is limited by time, a new cinematic reality is formed. — Helena Wittmann
“In the late 1920s, Walter Benjamin played a game with a 11-year-old girl. He would give her a few words, not less than five, not more than ten. She was then supposed to forge sentences out of these lexical groups, to give order to the arbitrary, to generate sense. The phrases she came up with were less about creating one meaning, and more about producing a state of flux. They were a work of moving and arranging, sliding and linking, creating a space where nothing was left out. (…) With Fantasy Sentences, I also played a game, one where you imagine a habitat where humans are only present via all the many things they left behind. What if a city consists of nothing, but coexisting traces? Family archives of black and white photos, Super 8 and Hi8 footage as repositories of memory. Housing blocks and supermarkets, bars and cinema theatres as repositories of memory. What about trees and bushes, birds and wolves, dust and concrete? How do they remember? What would they make of images of friends spending their time by the river? How would they read them? Who would do the translating? What would echo? And what would echo back? That was where our fantasy took us.” — Dane Komljen
De schilderijen van handen die gevonden werden in de grotten uit het Magdalénien in Sub-Atlantisch Europa worden negatieve handen genoemd. De contouren van deze handen – uitgestrekt op de rotswanden – tekenen zich af in kleur. Meestal blauw, zwart. Soms rood. Er is voor deze praktijk nog geen uitleg gevonden. Van de Bastille in Parijs tot de Champs-Elysées reist Les mains négatives in één lang shot doorheen de lege straten bij zonsopgang. De beelden van de ontwakende stad en de nacht die plaatsmaakt voor de dag, worden bewoond door de voice-over van Marguerite Duras, die reflecteert over liefde en verlies en verre plaatsen. “Duras is becoming more and more important. There’s a connection. Her idea of filmmaking or how she treats language. She’s very rigorous, but what entered also into Human Flowers of Flesh is a certain kind of romanticism. She managed to do that without getting into any kind of kitsch. It’s always very profound and concrete.” — Helena Wittmann
De obsessie van Stan Brakhage met het maken van films is als de aantrekkingskracht van licht op een insect: dwangmatig, onverklaarbaar en zelfdestructief. A “found foliage” film, Mothlight is made without a camera. Brakhage pasted mothwings and flowers between two layers of clear 16mm Mylar editing tape and ran it through the printing machine, leading to a resurrection in the projector’s beam. Mothlight is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. “Not the camera but the projector; not a representation but the thing itself, a ribbon of once-living stuff preserved in celluloid coursing along, flashing before our eyes: It was neither Muybridge’s 1879 motion studies nor the Lumière brothers’ 1895actualités nor even Peter Kubelka’s imageless flicker film Arnulf Rainer (1960) that truly manifested the very essence of cinema but the film-object Mothlight, a three-minute-thirteen-second motion-picture collage assembled and printed by Stan Brakhage… An eyeblink of a movie that makes light of theory.” — J. Hoberman
